Psychosis on the Rocks

I have a bar staff of about five people, and they're the most flexible and versatile bartenders I know. The reason is that while many bar bloggers work in their home kitchens and subject their spouses and adolescent children to their cocktail revelations, I have an entire city upon which to subject them. And I do, gleefully, with the help of the bartenders.

Although Red Feather has been obsessed with ice for several years, my most recent departure from reality has involved the systemization of freezing, storing, and using about 6 different kinds of ice (stay with me here...)

Because I'm completely psychotic, I feel that every single type of ice we use is perfect for its application, and none are expendable.

In the old days (last year,) we would buy huge blocks of mineral ice and crack it with a hammer and chisel. This, not surprisingly, was around the time the entire bar staff turned (save for the golden boy, Mark Allen.) Over the last several months, and with the help of my friend/person whom I stalk, Sasha Pertraske, I have discovered better ways of producing and keeping all of this crazy ice. Modified silicon ice trays, this little tool, and the 50 cubic feet of freezer space behind my bar have made the following possible:

Big Ice is cracked from small blocks to fit our shakers and is used to chill shaken drinks without turning them to slush or diluting them too much. Big ice is not for every drink, and is not for every spirit. Cocktails with eggs in them and classic juiceless whiskey drinks, (if you must shake them,) benefit most from the use of big ice.

Cubed Ice differs from machined ice in that, although it is small, it is not hollow. We use this cubed ice for drinks served in shorter, old fashioned style glasses.

Tall Ice is used, well, for tall glasses. We freeze these to fit the glass so that the ice touches the bottom of the glass, and rises above the surface of the drink. This helps to reduce dilution and keep the drink colder and full-flavored longer. It also quiets the little voices in my head...

While I admit to being completely obsessive over this matter, I am not alone. There are a couple of ice machine manufacturers making ice that is solid and dilution-conscious. Kold-draft, for example, was out of business until about last year, when they started producing cocktail-grade ice making systems again.

Although the choice of ice is often determined by the reaction of the drink's components to chilling, it is often a stylistic choice. For example, the Caipirinha can be served in a tall glass with tall ice, or in a short glass with cubes. The choice is completely stylistic in this case, and I would probably choose the short glass because it just seems more fitting for the drink. I should also point out that machined ice is completely acceptable for many applications. We still make about 11,000 mojitos every night at Red Feather, and all that lime juice tastes great shaken up with slushy, hollow ice. The same is true for a standard highball cocktail... a rum & coke with tall ice is just... silly.

Fever of the Mad

I visited New Orleans in July for the 5th Annual Tales of the Cocktail conference and spent most of my four days there drunk or getting drunk. Luckily for you, this is not the kind of blog where we chronicle a bunch of stuff that happened and what was said, since it's a bit of a blur. One evening of late night shots containing Lucid Absinthe and white peach nectar is worth mentioning, however, since by that drunken inspiration was born the Fever of the Mad...

The Fever of the Mad is a drink that reminds me about the basic point in mixing quality drinks: Put two flavors together that help each other make sense. White peach and anise are great examples. And although the drink is mine, I wish I'd though of the pairing on my own. Credit in this case goes to that hot piece of a bartender from Milk & Honey (the best bar in the world,) who was mixing drinks in a suite at the Hotel Monteleone for all of us drunken conference goers at 5 in the morning.

It's easy to forget this basic principle of quality bar cheffery when surrounded by Coca-Cola Caviar and Gin & Tonic Jelly Cubes. Don't get me wrong, there's a time and a place and an application for Cognac Foam... but don't we have so many ingredients that we haven't used correctly yet? The Fever of the Mad is simple. Anise on the front, peach on the back, soft, almost fuzzy texture... I'm going to post about some fun Molecular Barstronomy in a future piece, but for now, I'm going to focus on learning how to pair flavors sans calcium chloride or xanthan.

Fever of the Mad

1/4 oz. Fresh Lemon Juice
1/3 oz. Herbsaint or Absinthe
2 oz. quality London Dry Gin
1 oz. scoop of Peach Sorbet*
3 dashes of Fee Brother's Peach Bitters (not pictured.. I forgot)

Shake until sorbet dissolves into cocktail, serve up.

*At Red Feather bar, we use sorbet like a lot of places use flavor syrups. While Monin and a few others do a nice job with flavor syrups, (and while you can make them yourself quite simply with some sugar, citric acid, fresh fruit, and boiling water,) sorbets usually contain less sugar, more residual real fruit, and more fresh flavor. They're also cold and assist in adding texture to cocktails. If you have a full-time bar manager, it's worth it to add this prep chore to his list. It's not hard or expensive, and it's totally worth it.

South American Vehicles of Drunkenness, Part 1

I write today as a lover of both South America and booze. Among my favorite South American boozes is pisco, a woody brandy made from the Muscat or Quebranta grapes Peru and Chile. I've probably consumed 20 pisco sours in the previous week, so I'll provide my perfected recipe after subjecting you to a shotgun history of this bebida.

Pisco is the enchanted spirit child of the people of Peru, and is actually the product of ancient wine snobbery; the discarded grapes not considered export-worthy for the production of wine were harvested by the field workers and fermented to make pisco. The fever for pisco spread as settlers and other travelers came and went through the growing region, and took pisco with them to drink on their respective joureys. When trade with Spain ceased in the mid-1600s, wine production ceased as well and only a few small pisco producers remained. The Pisco Sour was born abroad and became popular among traveling Americans and Europeans and helped revive the production of pisco.

Although both the Peruvians and the Chileans claim to hold the origin of pisco in their history, its name comes from the Quechua word pisqu, which translates in English as either little bird, or the name of a spiritual clay urn used by the Quechuan people, (there is much dispute over just about everything relating to pisco.) The Quechuan people resided in what is modern-day Ecuador/North Peru; not as far south as Chile although at the time the lands of present-day Chile and Peru were part of the same viceroyalty under the control of Spain. The Pisco growing region is in Peru today, but when it was first produced, neither Peru nor Chile even existed... and so in my book, geography wins and the spirit is referred to as Peruvian today.

Here's my recipe:
2 oz. Pisco
3/4 oz. lemon or key lime
1/4 oz. simple syrup
1 splash of fresh, pulp-free orange juice
1 egg white
Shake until you feel substantial pain in your arm. Strain up. Add a dash of angostura bitters or, if you can get it, Amargo Bitters...

The orange juice is my addition and is merely of cosmetic assistance to the drink; orange juice froths up beautifully when shaken with egg white. I think it's a reasonable modification, though there's no OJ in a traditional Pisco Sour. I put orange juice in every sour I make as I think lemon juice sweetened with sugar alone is still too jarring a combination. Orange juice is somewhere between sweet and tart, and provides a mellower solution to the sourness of lemon.

Anyone else forgotten this drink?

If the Silver Fizz and the Tom Collins were bottles of champagne, the Silver Fizz would be enjoyed like Larmandier-Bernier over 90 pages of Thoreau, and the Tom Collins would be guzzled by starfucking bromides over 90 expressions of intoxicated barfly non-sequitur. (That was the single most snobby sentence I've ever written.)

The Silver Fizz is everything I love in a sour. Tart, sweet, rich, simple to prepare, and available to the masses. Fizz drinks are probably the result of the early-1900s induction of soda water into the classic sours of the late-1800s. Although this drink's daddy, the Gin Fizz, is often thought to be the same thing as a Tom Collins, it's not. The Tom Collins was originally made with Old Tom Gin, which was sweetened itself, and changes the drink entirely. In the 50s and 60s, beverage producers started marketing Collins Mix, and the drink was made with the increasingly popular London Dry style of gin... When a drink gets a mixer named after it, it's over in my book.

Many fizz cocktails of the early soda water craze were shaken and served up, but I like mine over a glassful of cracked ice. Here's how I made the one pictured above, currently menued at Red Feather:

Silver Gin Fizz
2 oz. Tanqueray
1 oz. Fresh lemon juice
.5 oz Simple Syrup
1 Egg white
Shake until your shoulder joints lock in protest. Strain over new ice. Top with soda.


Sort of moving around, I recently read an article about a drink called the Heirloom Tomato Mojito. In the begining, I was optimistic. It's late summer, I thought, heirlooms are here and delicious... I'm floating in clouds of optimism over this cocktail.

Reading through the recipe was sort of like falling back toward the Earth, head-first. I crash down at the word tequila, and settle into the dirt at basil. Shaking off the fall, I remember that Mojitos are best, (and actual,) with rum and mint, and that sometimes we screw with drinks a little too much. I love aged balsamic vinegar, but not on top of my mojito. The Silver Fizz is another reminder along these lines. This drink is a great model and should replace any contemporary sour or fizz on any menu at least once or twice a season... because it's the best how it is.

The inspiration is simple: Find something forgotten and try it. If it sucks, we know why it was forgotten. If it's great, bring it back to life!

Golden Service

Having breakfast at Goldy's on Capital Boulevard last Saturday reminded me of why people wait in line, hung over, drinking coffee out of a paper cup for an hour or more before getting a table. I swear that the nicest people in this city work at Goldy's. I sit down, have a nice breakfast, and leave feeling satisfied and inspired to be a little more sunshiney and caffeinated. Anne, the best server in Boise, tells us as we're leaving that she's really glad we came in. And I believe her.

I am reminded of an often-forgotten tenet of the service business... service itself, that is. So many times I've chatted with a server or bartender that relays to me a horrifying story of a time when they told off some customer because they snapped their fingers or ordered their steak well done. I find this so grossly uninspiring that I often ask, "well, you're in service to them, aren't you?" What ever happened to sitting around after work and talking shit about people who act like jerks? We just return the favor instantly now?

It's no surprise that most servers hate me for my position on unconditional accomodation. My theory is that if a guest in your place swears at you, hits you, or tries to steal something, you take a firm and calm tone and ask them to leave. The only time you should ever be less that prozac is if you're telling someone to leave. If they're going to stay, you're going to be polite. Period. No defensive tone. No standing up for your human right to not be referred to as miss. No sense of entitlement over the kind of tip you think you deserve. You are a polite robot with a sharp personality, not a freedom fighter or some sort of foody educat. Servers like Anne at Goldy's make me understand exactly how innate the act of service really is.

Since I'd consumed about a quart of Sazeracs the night before, I only had orange juice on this particular morning, and it was great. The extend of my inspiration from Goldy's had little to do with drinking, and more to do with a sappy sort of adage that's hardly ever easy to pull off in the morning... service with a smile.

Let's talk mixers.

Drinkers are becoming more and more aware of what goes into their bodies, (and sometimes comes right back out,) during a night of boozing. At least I hope so.


As a bartender, I always found it strange that people would obsess over the brand of gin in their Gin & Tonic, but never ask a question about the damn tonic. I believe culinary movements geared toward natural, local, sourcable, and organic ingredients are spreading from the philosophical discussions between chefs and restaurateurs to the every-day diner... and maybe the drinker, too? I personally do not want to drink a glass of tonic sweetened with high fructose corn syrup that's going to poison my body more than the liquor itself. Give me the damn liquor poisoning!

The extremely high consumer demand for products that contain hydrogenated corn oils and high fructose corn syrup is also part of our fuel crisis; farming and transporting enough corn to make oils and syrups so that we can all die a little more quickly, either by breathing bad air or loosing our ability to breathe all together because we're so damn fat.

Getting back to the original point... how long will it take for bar programs to realize that quality non-alcoholic is just as important as quality spirits? Not just for ethical and moral reasons, but from the standpoint of flavor too. Every component of the cocktail is of equal importance, right? I'd rather pay another buck to get a quality tonic from Fever Tree (great stuff and all-natural... but not close. Quinine content this high must come from the UK,) or a natural Boylan's cola. Next time you sit down to have a drink, ask the bartender how he feels about mixers. I'm curious to know if anyone else cares...

Absinthe for reals.

Writing about the Sazerac at Bardenay inspired me to share some interesting information about absinthe... the mother of all anisettes. I recently heard about a company called Veridian Spirits out of New York that is legally producing real wormwood absinthe called Lucid. Legally? Yes.

Althought absinthe is most popular for its late-19th century fame in France, its origin is Switzerland. The name comes from the scientific designation of the wormwood plant, artemisia absinthium, which contains thujone... the chemical that gives us that funny feeling and consequently made the stuff illegal all over the world by about 1915. There were also a series of murders around the height of the drink's popularity in Switzerland, and the government attributed the crimes to the psychotic effects of absinthe and started a mass scare/obsession with la fee verte... the green fairy. The Temperance Movement in the US eliminated the possibility of bringing the absinthe back to us until 2007, when the regulations concerning the margin for error in the detection of thujone allowed Veridian Spirits to push absinthe production through the FDA, and make a way for the rest of us to get silly on that funny green stuff...

I am tracking down a case of this stuff because I want to make Sazeracs the way Thomas Handy made them in 1870 New Orleans. One day, it would be amazing to scare up vintage bottles of every Sazerac component and have a small party and drink, like... old school Sazeracs. We could even try and find some Sazerac de Forge Cognac...

Sazerac and "Sazerac"

As you can see, I am a poor photographer and my camera sucks. Not like you're missing much. This is a supposed Sazerac made with Lemon Bitters and Sweet Vermouth to boot. Hell, let's just throw some Fresca in there while we're at it.

Even more boggling is why such a well-known spot for cocktail drinkers would put the name of the drink on the menu without the drink actually being the drink! (?) Does this annoy anyone else? This is a common sin among bartenders I know, and I think it's a topic worth discussing at some point: When is a name already a drink, and therefore out of the pool of potential drink names? The Sazerac is obviously already taken. But what about... say... The Knikerbocker? A more obscure drink, but still printed in one of the most famous drink books ever published, and before that, published in every good bartender's bible. How many times have you seen The Kinckerbocker on a drink menu? And how many times has it been the actual drink?

Getting back to the point, The Sazerac is the greatest model for cocktails that do not contain juice. It is balanced, strong, simple, and proven. Try one at Red Feather in Boise or any hotel bar in New York. (They're surprisingly bad in the cocktail's origin, New Orleans...) and you'll understand why the Sazerac is still on great cocktail menus, (and some not-so-great cocktail menus) today.

Old Lore (whatever the hell that is,) tells us that the drink was probably invented in early-1800s New Orleans by Antoine Amedei Peychaud, the proprietor of Peychaud's Aromatic Bitters. Long story short, the drink became a staple at the nearby Sazerac Coffeehouse, and took its name shortly thereafter. At this time, the drink was made with Cognac and drops of absinthe. In 1870ish, a feller named Thomas Handy bought up the Sazerac Coffeehouse and started making the drink with Rye. The use of absinthe in the Sazerac is one of the only examples of pre-prohibition anisette cocktails.

Sazerac:
2 oz. Old Overholt Rye
1 healthy splash of simple syrup
3 dashes of Peychaud's bitters
Stir.
Rinse a chilled old fashioned glass with Absinthe or Herbsaint.
Strain. Zest a tiny peel of lemon over the drink and discard.

Drink quickly, "While it's still laughing at you."

So it's come to this...

Here we have two drinks from a semi-local suburbian restaurant & bar. The first is a butchered attempt at Cory Reistad's San Francisco variation on the Sidecar... cleverly called the Cable Car, and the second is something with FRESCA! (I could hardly wait to type the word.) Tanqueray Rangpur, Grand Marnier, FRESCA! and a twist of lemon. Ahem. FRESCA?!

One of my favorite stories about fabulous trashy bar patrons was relayed to me by a good friend who works downtown. He told me about this woman who ordered round after round of freaky tequila, red bull, and lemon juice cocktails in various ratios. She finally gave up, drunk off her wedges, and just said, "If you get it just right, it tastes just like Smirnoff Ice and Fresca!"... (please see below)

The Trashy Lady in Wedges (not the real drink name,) tastes a lot like what you might expect from a drink made of three very sweet components by a day bartender. Meh.

I love the Cable Car. And since I'm a total bitch, I ordered it off the menu because I was certain it was going to be wrong. The ingredients listed Pyrat as the rum (fancy, but it's not spiced,) and it was syrupy and schlep, using sour mix (or way too little lemon juice,) and about a quart of Grand Marnier.

I recently heard a great barman by the name of James Meehan say something interesting about the Cable Car. He said that people have forgotten the value of really simple drinks with components that anybody can get ahold of. Drinks like the Cable Car are making it possible for bars everywhere to have good drinks on their menus with limited and easily managed inventories. They're also making bartenders like Cory Reistad famous...

Here's how I like the Cable Car:

1.5 oz Spiced Rum, (I like Sailor Jerry's)
.5 oz. Cointreau or a good triple sec
Fresh lemon juice to taste (I like about .5 oz)
Shake. Serve up in a glass with a sugary rim.

Try one of these at Bardenay or Bittercreek in Boise... Or, if you're in San Francisco, try one at the Starlite Room in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel.